They fail. They ALL fail.

Small-business loan program shuts up shop after only giving out one-eighth of its budgeted loans, thanks mostly to incompetence at the Treasury Department.

Yet just $4.03 billion (out of $30 billion budgeted) made it out the door before the program shut down Sept. 27. Indeed, the first dollars weren’t approved until nine months after enactment . . . And two-thirds of the 933 applicants came away empty-handed, leaving scores of banks blindsided without time to appeal to Treasury.

. . .

Alabama’s GOP delegation, led by Sen. Richard Shelby and Rep. Spencer Bachus, top Republicans on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees, was adamant in its opposition. But when the first dollars went out the door, Alabama banks got $75 million, or almost 25 percent of the funds released by mid-July.

. . .

“The way in which institutions were denied is an example of the sort of thing that undermines confidence in government: Banks were refused without any explanation,” Frank wrote on Sept. 21. When Geithner belatedly replied — after the window had closed — that Treasury was seeking authorization from regulators for more transparency, Frank shot back: “In other words, no one in your department anticipated that banks who had been told this program was coming to their aid … would be interested in learning why they were turned down.”

And we should vote to re-elect this Democratic administration... WHY?

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality censors a scientific report on Galveston Bay to remove all references to human-caused climate change or pollution.

Anderson said TCEQ prevented the article - written for a report by the agency's Galveston Bay Estuary Program - from being published without the deletions. That, and Anderson's refusal to accept the changes, have held up publication of The State of the Bay.

. . .

Anderson wrote to TCEQ Commissioner Buddy Garcia Aug. 30 complaining about the censorship, including as an example the deletion of a section saying the ocean level in Galveston Bay is rising by 3 millimeters a year, compared with the long-term average of 0.5 millimeters.

"The sea level rates presented in this chapter are scientific fact, not speculation," he wrote to Garcia.

. . .

TCEQ also deleted any references to human-caused change in other contexts, including a reference to human activity being responsible for wetlands destruction.

And we should re-elect this Republican administration... WHY?

In a bipartisan vote, Congress ratifies three job-killing, wage-lowering, money-offshoring trade deals with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama.

And, it should be noted, this is one of the few things the Obama administration has fought long and hard for these past two years- mostly against the wishes of Nancy Pelosi.

In 2004, Hyundai inked one of the best land deals in history. For a mere $12 million, the South Korean conglomerate secured the rights to 50 years of use on over 41,000 square miles of industrial space -- $292 per square mile, only about 10 percent higher than the rate the U.S. paid France under the Louisiana Purchase.

. . .

The land Hyundai leased was located in North Korea, just beyond the U.S.-patrolled Demilitarized Zone, which separates the economically depressed, dictatorship-led North from the world's 14th-largest economy in the South.. . . working standards are nevertheless horrifying. Workers officially make a minimum wage of $60.78 per month -- 35 cents an hour based on a 40-hour work schedule -- but South Korean companies have almost no oversight capacity, according to the CRS. Laborers are hired, disciplined and fired by the North Korean government, and the wages are kept low via intense citizen repression.

"They're treated better than other workers in North Korea, which is not inconsistent with it being a slave labor camp," says Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), one of just a handful of legislators seeking to curtail abuses at Kaesong.

And if a trade deal between South Korea and the U.S. is approved by Congress as expected, products from Kaesong could be sold in the U.S. tariff-free.

. . .

...Panama does have some of the most stringent bank secrecy laws in the world, making it extremely easy and inexpensive for U.S. citizens to set up offshore corporations and bank accounts. Establishing the corporation and bank account costs less than $2,000, and any money that Americans stash in these entities is not taxed. Bank secrecy laws and extremely lax corporate registration standards make it very difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to track transactions transferring funds to these Panamanian destinations from the United States. Small surprise, then, that Panama is home to nearly 400,000 offshore corporations, more than any other nation except Hong Kong.

. . .

The trade agreement with Panama would effectively bar the U.S. from cracking down on this activity. The U.S. would not be allowed to treat Panamanian financial services transactions differently from transactions in nations that are not tax havens. It would also be unable to pursue some standard anti-money laundering techniques in Panama. Combating tax haven abuse in Panama would be a violation of the trade agreement, exposing the U.S. to fines from international authorities.

. . .

As HuffPost's Dave Jamieson reported in July, union members in Colombia are routinely murdered with impunity. Over the past 25 years, nearly 3,000 workers have been killed in the country, with convictions resulting in just six percent of all cases.

That violence has continued, and even escalated, since President George W. Bush first negotiated the trade deal with Colombia in 2007. That year, 37 union workers were killed. The next year, 52, followed by 49 in 2009 and 51 last year.

As a result, unions in the U.S. are strongly opposing the trade deal with Colombia, a move led by the AFL-CIO, the country's largest federation of organized labor groups. The AFL-CIO has said it does not want to see the U.S. condoning violence against workers, nor does it want American workers to have to compete with wages that are depressed using the credible threat of murder.

And we should re-elect this bipartisan Congress... WHY?

Neither party is acceptable. They're both corrupt and incompetent. They ALL need to go.

I don't know right now if we should start an American Spring Party to run the Republicrats out of business, or just challenge conservative Democrats in party primaries. I lean against the latter, because Democratic Party rules require all candidates to pledge total support to the party nominee- no matter how odious- but the latter is by far the more feasible path.

But I know where we can begin building a movement platform.

Three years after the financial crisis, the unemployment rate is still at the highest level since the Great Depression (except for a brief blip in the early 1980s).

Jobs are scarce, so many adults have given up looking for them...

...A record percentage of unemployed people have been unemployed for longer than 6 months.

And it's not just construction workers who can't find jobs. The median duration of all unemployment is also near an all-time high.

. . .

...Include people working part-time who want to work full-time, plus some people who haven't looked for a job in a while, and unemployment's at 17%.

Put differently, this is the lowest percentage of Americans with jobs since the early 1980s (And the boom prior to that, by the way, was from women entering the workforce).

. . .

Corporate profits just hit another all-time high.

Corporate profits as a percent of the economy are near a record all-time high. With the exception of a brief happy period in 2007 (just before the crash), profits are higher than they've been since the 1950s. And they are VASTLY higher than they've been for most of the intervening half-century.

CEO pay is now 350X the average worker's, up from 50X from 1960-1985.

CEO pay has skyrocketed 300% since 1990. Corporate profits have doubled. Average "production worker" pay has increased 4%. The minimum wage has dropped. (All numbers adjusted for inflation).

After adjusting for inflation, average hourly earnings haven't increased in 50 years.

In short... while CEOs and shareholders have been cashing in, wages as a percent of the economy have dropped to an all-time low.

. . .

Of course, life is great if you're in the top 1% of American wage earners. You're hauling in a bigger percentage of the country's total pre-tax income than you have at any time since the late 1920s. Your share of the national income, in fact, is almost 2X the long-term average!

And the top 0.1% in America are doing way better than the top 0.1% in other first-world countries.

In fact, income inequality has gotten so extreme here that the US now ranks 93rd in the world in "income equality." China's ahead of us. So is India. So is Iran.

... social mobility in this country is also near an all-time low.

... the top 1% of Americans own 42% of the financial wealth in this country. The top 5%, meanwhile, own nearly 70%.

. . .

And remember that huge debt problem we have—with hundreds of millions of Americans indebted up to their eyeballs? Well, the top 1% doesn't have that problem. They only own 5% of the country's debt.

... It's a great time to make a boatload of money in America, because taxes on the nation's highest-earners are close to the lowest they've ever been.

The aggregate tax rate for the top 1% is lower than for the next 9%—and not much higher than it is for pretty much everyone else.

As the nation's richest people often point out, they do pay the lion's share of taxes in the country: The richest 20% pay 64% of the total taxes. ... Of course, that's because they also make most of the money. ...

. . .

Bank lending dropped sharply, and it has yet to recover.

So, what have banks been doing since 2007 if not lending money to American companies? Lending money to America's government! By buying risk-free Treasury bonds and other government-guaranteed securities.

And, remarkably, they've also been collecting interest on money they are NOT lending—the "excess reserves" they have at the Fed. Back in the financial crisis, the Fed decided to help bail out the banks by paying them interest on this money that they're not lending. And they're happily still collecting it. (It's AWESOME to be a bank.)

Meanwhile, of course, the banks are able to borrow money FOR FREE. Because the Fed has slashed rates to basically zero. And the banks have slashed the rates they pay on deposits to basically zero. So they can have all the money they want—for nearly free!

When you can borrow money for nothing, and lend it back to the government risk-free for a few percentage points, you can COIN MONEY. And the banks are doing that. According to IRA, the "net interest margin" made by US banks in the first six months of this year is $211 Billion. Nice!

. . .

And it has helped generate near-record financial sector profits—while the rest of the country struggles with its 9% unemployment rate.

. . .

And those profits, of course, are AFTER the banks have paid their bankers. And it's still great to be a banker. The average banker in New York City made $361,330 in 2010. Not bad!

This average Wall Street salary was 6X the average private-sector salary...

And you'll notice this state of affairs is one that Republicans and Democrats cooperated to bring us- and that Obama's corporate-run Treasury Department continues to work to defend to this day.

I know you're tired of me saying it, but we need something else.